When selling our family home, my sister cleaned out my father’s desk. Among his drawing pencils and photographs were four neatly folded pages, carefully preserved through the years: a high school essay. Handwritten script, etched neatly between blue lines, detailed how his father had deserted his family when he was twelve, how he vowed never to speak to him again, the fierceness of his feelings. Amid this highly personal writing, red circles surrounded spelling errors, corrected punctuation. On the outside, an F was imprinted in bold red ink. I wonder if my father ever wrote again.
Body and Earth is written from and about the New England landscape. Encouraged by my editors to shape a text that “could be written in no other place,” I was inspired to reduce my travels and stay home. It took concentrated effort, including research, writing, and daily sojourns on the land, to begin to know my New England home the way I know my body. Drawing on what I know best, the rigors and truthfulness of dance, I began writing performance texts about my triangle of homes in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. Speaking as I moved required that I integrate the information embedded in the text into the expressive language of my body, an experience of inhabitation. What wasn’t essential fell away. The stories in this book are perhaps the most personal, poetic aspect of the text, exposing the underlying current that moved me from beginning to end, to beginning once again. Completing each chapter, these short texts are intended to be read aloud, engaging the breath rhythms and emotional investment of the spoken word.
The book spans my seven years as a stepmother. Meeting boys of nine and thirteen and accompanying them through adolescence, with few community rituals supporting the process, is humbling. Parenting journeyed me back through my own development, finding the cracks and places of resistance and exposing them to light. Engaging with teenagers reminded me of the deep vitality, optimism, and potential of adolescence. It also highlighted the ways in which our entire culture is adolescent in its resistance to the process of maturation that could move us toward a new way of living with the land. As the boys ventured off on wilderness trips or their own creative explorations, I was invited to experience beyond what I had known. My view of life had been to survive adventure; now it was to grow a heart large enough to encompass what came.
This writing also spanned the death of my father. His passing changed my relationship to this American soil, linking generation to generation. Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography, says about his childhood on the Nebraska and South Dakota plains: “The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien…. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.” Knowing my father’s ashes were spread in the sea, I began to understand his words. Thus, the cycles moving from life to death, from daughter to mother, from visitor to inhabitant, form a defining arc to the progression of the text.
I have written Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide as an educator who dances, performs, and lives an involved life in New England with a husband, stepsons, and a dog. Each chapter or “day” includes elements I have found vital to my own learning: visual imagery, factual information, movement exercises, anecdotes, and personal stories offering diverse inroads into whole-body learning. The goal is to inspire you, the reader, to your own stories, maps, and ways of knowing. As we open our perceptual resources to the present moment, wherever we are, wherever our roots have been, we inspire care, investing our human resources in the land and communities we call home. Throughout the book, you are encouraged to take your own body seriously, to know it as familiar, as the vessel through which you experience the earth.
We have so carefully learned to disguise what we think and feel. Psychologist Carol Gilligan writes that girls assume a voice at puberty and use it long after it has outgrown its effect—perhaps for a lifetime. Through academic training and the daily lessons of our lives, many of us have been taught to be good and to be quiet or to say what others want to hear. The feeling of risk that accompanies telling the truth is enormous. What is the purpose of writing, after all? To perpetuate what we already know or to open new doors?
Pen, painting by Jim Butler. Oil on canvas, 27.5 in. × 90 in.
INTRODUCTION
We react, consciously or unconsciously, to the places where we live and work, in ways we scarcely notice or that are only now becoming known to us…. In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.
—Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place
Body and Earth is about relationship. It is a guide to help us reflect on what has shaped our attitudes and ideas about the world and about ourselves. Through our education in our homes, in schools, in our travels, and in our spiritual communities, we have developed a relationship to our bodies and to the environment. In this book, scientific views and experiential exercises are interwoven to help us investigate these attitudes and ideas, to notice if they are currently useful to our lives and to the health of the earth.1 With attention to how memory and new information interact, we can become aware of our biases and assumptions and stimulate our imagination and curiosity for further exploration.
HUNTING FOR HOPE
Environmental writer Scott Russell Sanders teils of a backpacking trip he took with his sixteen-year-old son. His numerous books and articles detail the changes in his Midwest landscape, the destruction ofecosystems, the carelessness of our relationship with the earth. At the end of a difficult climb, the son turned to his father and said, “Your writings are destroying my hope.” This comment inspired his next book, called Hunting for Hope.
The body is the medium through which we experience ourselves and the environment. The ways we gather and interpret sensory information affect both how we monitor our internal workings and how we construct our views of the world. Thus, the text begins by exploring underlying patterns and perception, including basic principles of life and earth sciences that have shaped and currently affect our views of both body and earth. Next, we focus on the weave of relationships between bones and soil, breath and air, muscles and animals, digestion and plants, water and fluids. The text concludes with animating aspects of body and earth, including sensuality, creativity, and spirituality. Thus, the book provides a context to revisit and revision what we know, by noticing patterns of interconnectedness.
Throughout this study you are invited to choose a “place” in nature near enough to home for consistent field study visits. With notebooks in hand, we attend to specifics of our environment in order to connect to the places we live as participants and inhabitants, rather than as passersby. Weather patterns and seasons help us notice natural cycles of change, experience death or transitional stages as part of life, and deepen our relationship to the rhythms of the natural world. The goal, as we heighten sensual awareness of the environment and track our perceptual biases, is to expand our ability to respond, our response-ability, and ultimately to recognize ourselves as active participants in the world.
Language is a map for a way of thinking. Recognizing that language can point toward but does not replace experience, I have attempted to present specific information to enhance our creative explorations. In this study we learn the names of things as a way of claiming intimacy. We see not simply “leg” but “femur;” not “bird” but “barred owl.” We use naming to suggest valuing through specificity. With a fresh view of language we can enhance our sense of familiarity, of family. Names reflect the universality as well as the uniqueness of each individual person, plant, or soil type. We are part of a larger group with shared characteristics, and we are also unique in each moment.
The art images, writing suggestions, and “to do” exercises in the book suggest forms for creative expression. They represent the life work of many individuāls filtered through my own experience, offering a brief
